AI and Creativity

I wrote a thread on Twitter back in mid-2020 about AI and creativity. GPT3 had just landed and there was much discussion about what this would mean for creativity. I think the original thread holds up so I'm going to re-run it here as a short article.

As much as you may not want to admit it, your content probably sits somewhere between here and here:

Really good AI will probably end up landing here - whether that is writing or whatever. This is because AI is trained on existing creative output:

But the goal for humans is to create things that land at the extreme ends of the distribution curve. Because these are the creations that define humanity. Creations that capture our spirit and common experience in a way that only humans can understand and which move us:

Or to put this another way: IMO ChatGPT is to writing what photography was to painting. The image at the top of the article is a detail from Monet's "Woman with a parasol". It was created by Monet around the time that photography was beginning to have an impact on painters. It forced artists to look beyond exacting replications of what they saw (photography could do this better). Instead artists began to paint what they could feel. You can see this in the details in Monet's use of colour and movement.

Monet was a father of the the Impressionist movement which was one such response to the development of photography. This stimulus created entirely new forms of creative expression.

AI will be a tool for artists to imagine new ways for humans to express themselves. I can't wait.